Video: The new three-part Blur Gallery

In this movie I'll introduce you to the Blur Gallery, which allows you to create depth of field effects in post. And I have to say this is a really interesting command. There's a lot more going on than you might first expect. In this composition I've gone ahead and masked this bird out of its previous background and added a new background on an independent layer. Now let's say I want to take that background and blur it. Go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and any of these first three commands is going to bring up the Blur Gallery. I'm going to go ahead and choose Field Blur.

In this course, Deke McClelland offers a sneak peek at the new features in Photoshop CS6. He reveals the secrets behind the new dark interface, searchable layers, the powerful Blur Gallery, Camera Raw 7, video editing, and the Adaptive Wide Angle filter, which removes distortion from extreme wide-angle photographs and panoramas. Deke also covers the new nondestructive Crop tool, dashed strokes, paragraph and character styles, editable 3D type, and the exciting Content-Aware Move tool, which moves selections and automatically heals the backgrounds.

The new three-part Blur Gallery

In this movie I'll introduce you to the Blur Gallery, which allows you to createdepth of field effects in post.And I have to say this is a really interesting command. There's a lot more goingon than you might first expect.In this composition I've gone ahead and masked this bird out of its previousbackground and added a new background on an independent layer.Now let's say I want to take that background and blur it.Go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and any of these first three commands isgoing to bring up the Blur Gallery.I'm going to go ahead and choose Field Blur.

Notice you can control the amount of blur, either using this numerical value orusing the heads-up display here in the center of the image.So if I drag this control clockwise I'm going to increase the blur; drag itcounterclockwise to reduce the blur.I'm going to go ahead and move this point up there.And you might wonder why in the world I did that.After all, the Field Blur is uniform throughout the image, which is true unlessyou decide to add more pins.So let's say I want these clouds to be pretty darn out of focus, but I want tobring back some of the focus in the tree.I'd click to create a second pin and then I would dial it back like so, which isgoing to bring that tree into slightly sharper focus.

Also bring some of the grass down here in the lower left corner of the imageback into focus as well.All right, in addition to blurs, if I click on one of these points to reselect itthere, I could also add a Light Bokeh. And so I could crank this value up tosomewhere in the neighborhood of 50%.You can also increase the colorfulness of the Bokeh if you like and you candetermine which luminance levels are affected by that Bokeh.In my case and I'm not really interested in that Bokeh for this effect.So I'll go ahead and turn that checkbox off.I also want you to notice that even though we're working on the background imagehere, we can actually see the entire composition, which is a remarkable thingabout the Filter Gallery.

Other filters don't work this way.Also worth noting, see how you can see all the menus at the top of the screen?Most of them are completely dimmed out.However, if you go the Window menu, notice that you can bring up panels if you like.So for example I could choose to bring up the Layers panel.Now I can't switch between layers, however I can see which layers are at work in my image.All right, now I'll go ahead and apply the blur by clicking on the OK button andPhotoshop will go ahead and render the blur in the background.All right, now I'm going to switch to a different image.Let's say you're blurring inside of a selection.

I've got this background beach layer selected and notice by the way I'm workingon standard pixel layers.The Blur Gallery unfortunately is not compatible with Smart Objects.I'm going to switch over to the Channels panel and notice that I've got thisgradient channel that I've created in advance.I'm going to press the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac and click on it toload it as a selection outline.Now, I'll return to my RGB image, switch back to the Layers panel as well.Now because Blur Gallery was the last filter I applied, it's going to be up thereat the top of the Filter menu.So, I can return to the filter by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F or Command+Option+F on the Mac.

Notice my Layers panel is still there.If you end up accumulating panels and then you decide you want to get rid ofthem, just click on the words Blur Gallery in the upper right corner of thewindow and choose Reset Workspace.Now because I've pressed Ctrl+Alt+F or Command+Option+F on the Mac I'm seeing mylast applied blur settings.To get rid of all those pins you can click on the Remove Pins button right there.All right, now I'm going to create a new pin, so that I have some sort ofblur going on and I'm going to crank that guy up to let's say about 20 pixels worth of blur.

And notice that the blur dissipates over the course of this election.I'll press Ctrl+H or Command+H on the Mac, which will not only hide theselection outline; it also hides my pin, as you can see, even though it's still in effect.But what's happening here is the blur is becoming increasingly more translucentas the selection dissipates.It's not necessarily the effect we want though.We really want the scene to grow less and less blurry as opposed to having amore translucent blur over the course of that selection. And if you want toachieve that effect,then you want to crank this Selection Bleed value up. I'm going to take it all theway to 100%, which will allow that blur to bleed as far as it can into myselection and then I'll once again click OK in order to apply that effect.

All right, now let's take the look at the other two styles of blur, which areIris and Tilt-Shift.I'm going to switch to this image of this old car and then I'll press Ctrl+Alt+For Command+Option+F on the Mac once again in order to bring up the Blur Gallery.Now if I expand Iris Blur in order to switch over to it, so we can switchbetween these blurs to any extent you like,notice not only does Photoshop go ahead and collapse the Field Blur but itleaves it on, so you can actually have multiple blurs combined with each otherinside of this window.

I'm going to go ahead and turn off the Field Blur and I'm also going to pressCtrl+H or Command+H on the Mac, so I can see what I'm doing because mycontrols were hidden there.All right, I'm going to create a point of focus right there on that headlight andnotice that the focus starts off at a 100%.You can dial that down if you want to.So, you can have everything be a little bit blurry if you like.But I'm going to keep that at a 100.And I'm also going to drag this guy out like so so that we can create thiselliptical field of blur here, and here's how it works.

Out here at the edge, we're all the way out of focus. That is, we've applied ourBlur value of 15 pixels.I'll go ahead and take that up just a little bit so we have a more pronounced effect.Right here at this point, we're in focus and notice these guys move in togetheror out together by default.If you want to move one independently of another, you press the Alt key or theOption key on a Mac and drag it toward or away from the center.Now just as with the Field Blur, you can have multiple points of focus and youcreate them just by clicking with that Pen Cursor and then you can once againmove your controls as you like.

Notice that there's one other point, the square point right there, that you canmove and that's going to give you more of a rounded rectangles effect.Also worth noting, by the way, is you have one level of undo and you can pressCtrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac to implement it.Now of course these circles here represent a kind of filter mask and if you wantto save that mask out as an Alpha channel, you can turn on this checkbox.To preview what the mask looks like.You press and hold the M key and that will show you the masked regions inblack, so those are the protected regions, and then the regions that areaffected are shown in white.

Just go ahead and release the M key in order to return to the color image.All right, I'm going to go ahead and click OK in order to apply that blur tothe image and some of these are little more time-consuming than others, as you can see.And of course it's going to take longer in a high-resolution image.Finally let's take a look at the Tilt-Shift blur.We're going to use it to create a kind of fake miniatures effect here and turnthis bustling street scene into a kind of tiny town.So I once again press Ctrl+Alt+F or Command+ Option+F on the Mac to bring up the Blur Gallery.I'll go ahead and turn off the Iris Blur and turn on Tilt-Shift, expanded aswell, so that I can see its controls. And I'm going to move the point to thetop of the bus right about there and I'm going to take this guy all the waydown, really tight to it.

This point, of course, represents the beginning of the blur and I'm pressing theShift key as I drag these points in order to constrain my drag, so it's exactly vertical.Then I'll go ahead and drag the dotted line upward.This represents the point after which everything is uniformly blurry.And I'll go ahead and drag this guy down outside of the image, which isentirely possible obviously.All right now I'm just going upward by pressing the Spacebar and dragging.When applying a Tilt-Shift blur, you also have a Distortion option.Now, what it's going to do is apply distortion in the foreground of the scene.

We're not seeing it that much because we're not blurring that much of the foreground.However, if you also want to apply the distortion symmetrically in a background,then you turn on this Symmetrical Distortion checkbox.Now I'm not really interested in a distortion for this effect, but I did wantyou to see how that works.All right now I'll go ahead and click OK in order to apply that Tilt-Shift blurand I'll press the F key a couple of times in order to fill the screen with theimage, and now we have a fake miniature effect, didn't even need to create a mask to apply it.thanks to the new Blur Gallery inside Photoshop CS6.

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Q: This course was updated on 1/15/2013. What changed?

A: The course was revised to address the new Photoshop features and enhancements bundled with the Creative Cloud update released in December 2012. We added a second chapter to the course, detailing the new enhancements. We cover the Liquify and Blur Galleries, which now
support Smart Objects; creating conditional actions; auto-naming merged layers; moving a point with the Pen tool on the fly; creating global default type styles; and copying CSS code from specialty layers. We also cover two improvements to the 3D package included with Photoshop Extended: enhanced 3D lighting with 32-bit color and the new default 3D image-based light. We also updated the exercise files with new files for Chapter 2 and added an introductory video to the beginning of Chapter 2 that outlines the improvements.

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